What do you use for Windows Server monitoring?

[LessieHoeger]

Hi,
We monitor a number of resources on our network via WMI. These are all 2K12R2, 2K19, 2K22 M$ boxes.
I would need to monitor about this:
~10500 Windows servers
~300 ESX Hosts in multiple clusters
We are using WMI based monitoring right now, it can consume CPU and cause problems such as unresponsive ,RPC issues , WMI Rebuilding and so on. Sometimes I have to restart the Windows Management Instrumentation service.
We don't have the time to troubleshoot it.
What are you using for systems monitoring?
What do you recommended? Agent based , SNMP , WinRM / HTTPS ?
Any help is appreciated. Thanks.

[DoubleDoubleA]

I'd say mostly people use the Nagios Cross Platform Agent (NCPA) for Windows monitoring. SNMP works as well, though Windows only natively supports up to v2c, but then on the other other hand there are SNNMP v3 add-ons for Windows.

[danisa]

NCPA is often favored these days because it’s more secure out-of-the-box and Football Bros exposes more Windows-specific metrics without custom OIDs.

[GldRush98]

FYI, you're not going to avoid problems switching to NCPA. You'll still have to deal with NCPA crashing or needing restarted, etc... just like WMI does.
It is infrequent, but I do have issues with NCPA every once in a while where the service just stops or hangs and requires manual intervention.
But yes, we go with the NCPA agent due to the flexibility it offers with the ability to run plugins.